Nothing Else Matters
by Akiko Keeper of Sheep
Summary: Jim Kirk has only ever had The Mission, until Leonard McCoy happens to him, just as Leonard has lost everything that ever meant anything to him. Now all that Leonard is left with is Jim's Mission, just when Jim is being given a glimpse at something that matters a hell of a lot more. Pre-slash. [[Part I of The Captain's Creed]]
1. Subjective

Part One: Subjective

_ Tiny fingers, warm and familiar, curled around his own. Dark eyes just like his gleamed playfully as they tracked across his face, and he smiled through the crimson tears that stained his rough cheeks._

_ "This is a silly park, Daddy," she giggled. "Lots of balloons to play with. You like balloons, don't you, Daddy?"_

_ "Yes."_

_ "It's a shame you have to go."_

_ He blinked, but the eyes that blinked back weren't like his anymore. They were the gray-blue of an overcast sky, and filled with angry tears._

_ "I have to go," she rasped, blood spilling from her lips as the crowd swallowed her whole. "I have to go."_

_ "But-" He reached out, fingers wriggling like worms as her face crumpled with a tinny sound._

_ "At least I left when I was supposed to," she shrieked. "You could have left, too. You could have-"_

_ "Here, Daddy," the oozing gremlin at his feet wheedled. "I brought you a balloon."_

_ It was shiny, reflecting his face back at him, but he didn't look, didn't want to see. He watched as it floated up and up, bobbing bright yellow in the too-blue sky. It stared down at him mockingly, drifting until it was beaming down like the sun, hot and peeling. It giggled with her voice._

_ "You love me, don't you, Daddy?"_

_ The balloon burst with a mighty pop, and the universe went black._

:::

He would never be sure if it was the alarm that woke him, or the dream. He could hardly ever tell anymore, and had long since stopped wondering, just as he had stopped trying to grasp at the tattered tails of the dreams, to drag them back, to remember them.

These days, remembering usually hurt more than it comforted.

With a groan, Leonard rolled out from under the thin sheet, kicking slightly when it seemed to tighten around his ankles, shivering as the cool air of his quarters chilled his sweaty skin. Absently, he tugged at the thin tank top he'd slept in, peeling it away from his body and tossing it into a dark corner.

It would still be dark out, he surmised, though it had been so long since he'd so much as imagined having windows that for all he knew, Earth had suddenly developed 24-hour sunlight. He could just picture the Councillors on the holo, smiling slimily as they promised more summer for everyone.

"We care about The People," they'd wheedle. "Sunlight for all, round the clock, for the good of the Earth!"

Snorting, Leonard stumbled into the locker that Stratos was trying to pass off as a bathroom, sidling around the wobbly toilet to edge into the shower. It was barely big enough for one, and the water was only ever cold. It left a smell, copper-iron like blood, that would follow Leonard for the rest of the day, but he found himself ridiculously glad of it. Better a cold shower than forced to test Stratos' new sonic technology. He'd personally had to piece together the last few test subjects - there hadn't been enough left of earlier test subjects to piece together.

Leonard wasn't one for dawdling in the shower - wouldn't have been, even if it had been clean, hot water that didn't smell of blood, even if he'd had good soap that didn't crumble under his fingers. Today, though...something about today had him lingering, leaning back against the cold metal wall and letting the shower beat a mass of prickles across his chest.

He knew what this was, of course. He'd known from the moment they'd shown him to his new accommodations what they were trying to accomplish. He'd seen the results shivering and empty on the biobeds in his ward, back before. Back when his job was to heal people. He'd read about it in history classes, seen slides of concentration camps and prison torture.

He was lucky, he knew. He was smart, smarter than the majority of the poor bastards who got pressed into service at Stratos. He was useful. That made him special, made him one of the fortunate few who escaped the true dehumanization. He wasn't like the others, who were only useful as lab animals and pack animals and labor animals. He was most useful with his humanity intact, and Stratos knew it.

So he got his own quarters, his own little six-by-six corner to shiver in. He got a shower, and a toilet. He got fed replicated bread and fruit, got more than one set of clothing, got to talk without being disciplined, so long as he never spoke the wrong thing to the wrong people. He was allowed a bed, allowed a sheet, allowed a name. He was lucky, they told him. He was a step above the rest of humanity, which meant that he got to keep whatever humanity they left him.

He wondered, sometimes, if they knew how dangerous that was - to never fully break the smart ones. To let them speak, to remember, to dream. To let them hold on to the memory of sunlight and the taste of peaches and the voices of their children. But, then, the gargoyles that ran Stratos had never put much store in the strength of humans. There was no such thing as a dangerous homo sapien.

As he tugged his scrubs on roughly over damp skin, Leonard mused that, perhaps, they weren't so wrong about that. He turned the thought over in his head as he caught sight of his own face in the cracked mirror over the desk, bile rising at the tangle of black and silver that webbed out from his left temple like a roadmap, curling around his eye. His silver eye, gleaming unnaturally in contrast to the hazel of its twin.

Did he even count as human anymore?

The walk to the lifts was silent save for the soft whisper of his moccasins against the steel floor. The chill permeated the soles of his feet, and he paused at the lift doors to gather up the memory of the feel of solid boots with thick soles. Jabbing his thumb against the scanner, Leonard didn't smile, but the ghost of warm feet that didn't ache soothed him.

He'd only been with Stratos for two years, he remembered idly as he waited out the lift journey. Two years of bare essentials and brainwashing that never quite sank in. Two years of pretending he felt blessed when he knew better. Two years without his baby girl.

The thought of Joanna nearly undid his blank expression. He hadn't been given notice of her in three months. He wondered if perhaps he was playing it too complacent. It was always a thin wire he walked when negotiating for news of his daughter - too cooperative, and they saw no need to bribe him with updates - not cooperative enough, and...

The delicate twist and snap of tiny, familiar fingers and the shrill scream of a child in pain rattled in his brain, and Leonard let his eyes slide shut for a breath too long for it to be a blink, the only outward sign of his distress that he could afford to show.

Yeah, he knew what being too belligerent would get him.

The bunker where his workstation was housed was cavernous, stretching out beneath what Leonard knew to be several city blocks crowded with shops and cinemas and parks. Large areas were screened off - weapons design, sonics technology, warp improvements, environmental studies, etcetera. He wasn't allowed in those sections - no one was, save those who worked there.

The section that was his destination was by far the largest, the electrified cages screened off from the rest of the room, biobeds and dissection tables lined up along one wall. There were drains here, set into a slightly sloping floor at regular intervals for easy clean up, and a bank of computers, each one designated to a busy worker bee, just like Leonard. In spite of the nature of this section, it was usually the quietest, save for the soft tones of the computer functions and the vitals monitors. Except, of course, when one of the test subjects got riled up, which invariably meant Leonard would spend his day hosing chunks of what had ostensibly been a person down the drains and sterilizing the newly-vacated cage.

The steel beams supporting the ceiling curved high overhead, looming, and Leonard had entertained many fantasies about the entire structure collapsing, high-rises crumbling in on them, the whole operation laid bare to the sun like a cyst being opened, pus and death oozing out.

It never happened, and never would, but Leonard could dream.

His eyes traced the familiar forms of his 'coworkers' as they slid into their stations, pulling up the timetables for the day, mapping out the procedures they would be performing to get the results their overseers were looking for.

They had been like him, he remembered, slipping into his own seat and pulling up his to-do list and trying not to think about the life he'd had where breakfast had been a real thing. His fellows had been human, too, at some point - normal, scared, bending under the weight of what was being demanded of them. He hadn't known their reasons. He assumed they'd had reasons, like he did, but maybe they were just cowards in the end.

Now they were vacuums, scrubbed clean of everything but instructions to be carried out. They were useful, like Leonard, because they were brilliant at what they did, and their brilliance was about all they had left. The spidery lines stretched across their foreheads, crawling over the bridges of their noses, making their quicksilver eyes stand out. Blank eyes that didn't question or doubt, that flickered over everything analytically, taking in every detail and storing it for future use.

Walking hard drives, he'd heard them called by their overseers. And soon, Leonard would be like them.

As if to confirm this, his timetable opened with only one heading.

SUB. 02006-A-68-6J

0600: REPORT TO ROOM AP-774

Swallowing grimly, Leonard closed out of his terminal and stood. A sensation like pins and needles ran up and down his spine, and he could feel his stomach rebelling, but he schooled his features into his usual emotionless mask. He'd known this was coming - it had been a while since the last procedure - but that didn't make it any less terrifying.

Would this be the one, he thought. Would this be the procedure that wiped everything that was Leonard McCoy from his mind? Would this be the moment he became Subject 02006-A-68-6J? He rubbed his palm over the numbers and letters he knew were inked onto the back of his neck and sighed through his nose nervously.

He thought of Joanna as he strode with forced confidence towards the door to the corridor he loathed more than any other. He thought of her smile, her eyes that looked like his, her hair that curled like her mother's. He thought of the bedtime stories she'd liked best, and of summers at his mama's house, and of splitting a secret chocolate bar in the haze of an early morning, when everyone else was asleep but the two of them. He thought of the way she kicked her legs while she colored, and of all the things she'd do when she grew up, all the brilliant, wonderful things.

The corridor was long, and tight, and blindingly lit. There was only one door, at the very end, plain steel with no knob. It swung open when he reached it, like it always did, and slammed shut with all the ominous timing of Old Hollywood.

Leonard snorted mentally as the lights flickered on, illuminating a room empty except for a modified biobed. It sat in the middle of the space, its various attachments jutting out from it like an insect's legs - a device Stratos had developed that would scan a lifeform and record data, six mechanical arms with pads on the ends that Leonard knew from painful experience contained needles, long tubes leading to globes of differently colored fluids that would be injected into him through the pads, and, of course, steel restraints that would leave ugly bruises that faded quicker than they ought to have from a human.

What does 'human' even mean anymore? Leonard wondered as he toed off his slippers.

"Subject," the feminine computerized voice instructed as he removed his top, "remove all clothing and move to a reclining position on the biobed."

He was already hoisting himself up by the time she'd reached the end of her instructions, lying back and trying not to flinch when the restraints activated.

"Keep still during the procedure."

He swallowed again, closing his eyes and trying to force his heart rate to slow as the computer scanned him head to toe, recording vitals, nutrient levels (he knew those had to be shit, he hadn't eaten since midday the day before), brainwaves, whatever Stratos felt they needed to know about him.

This was the fifth procedure he'd had like this. Whatever they were doing to him seemed to be more involved than whatever his fellows had undergone - they'd been done after the second treatment. He wondered what was different about him.

"Don't suppose you're gonna tell me what you're doing to me this time," he drawled quietly, relaxing with a conscious effort as the pads arced over the sides of the bed, pressing against his chest and abdomen and neck. "Didn't think so," he muttered.

"Stand by to begin the procedure."

Joanna, he thought. She'd be five. Probably learned her letters and numbers already.

He remembered teaching her to ride a horse. Showing her the constellations and laughing when she made up her own. Pancakes with strawberries on top and whipped cream smiles. Her eyes, just like his eyes had been, his other eyes, from before-

Fire rippled over his nerve endings, and he must have screamed, but it melted into the splash of a toddler learning to swim.

_ "Don't let go, Daddy! Don't let go!"_

_ "Never, Sweetpea. I'd never let you go. I've got you."_

Rocking her to sleep after what happened with Jocelyn.

_ "Shhh, Sweetpea. It's okay. I've got you."_

_ "Don't go, Daddy. Don't let me go."_

The robotic voice buzzed at the edge of hearing, the words jumbled and garbled in his ears. "Proc...re is 50%...98...augm...jected."

Joanna. Joanna, he reminded himself, pushing the pain to the back of his mind. Joanna singing Jingle Bells as he lit up their tree. Curling up with him to watch the rain trace patterns on the window, her little head tucked up under his chin. How proud he was when she said she wanted to fix people when she grew up, just like him...

_ "You love me, don't you, Daddy?"_

"Procedure complete."

As the electric burn of whatever they'd done faded into a maddening itch, Leonard shifted, tensing against the restraints that hadn't released when they should have. "Hey. Hey! You gonna unlock me?"

There was a pause, and then a nearly normal voice murmured over the intercom.

"Please be patient, Doctor McCoy. We shall release you shortly."

Several thoughts raced through Leonard's mind at those words, not the least disturbing of which was the use of his name and title. He hadn't been called anything but 'Subject' since shortly after his arrival here. That, plus the use of the word 'please', was enough to stun him.

The voice itself had been unfamiliar - not one of the overseers, then. Leonard always remembered them. This voice had been deep, resonant, and carried some kind of UK accent. It had made the hairs on the back of Leonard's neck stand up.

He tried to relax, blinking as the vision in his right eye went fuzzy at the edges. It cleared, though, and kept clearing, sharpening until he could see tiny dust motes floating past several feet above his head.

Leonard scowled openly. It had been exactly what had happened just before his left eye had bled into that inhuman silver color, leaving him with the odd gift of enhanced sight in only one eye. It had definitely played hell with his depth perception, he recalled, shoulder throbbing in memory of being run into more than one doorway. He was certain the overseers had gotten a hell of a good laugh out of that.

That had been the last procedure. The two before that had ended up improving the hearing in his right ear drastically, which had made orienting himself in unfamiliar locations oddly headache-inducing. While being able to hear the heartbeat of whoever was under his scalpel was certainly a useful ability, it had taken some getting used to. Not, he reasoned, as much getting used to as hearing the heartbeat stop had taken.

The first procedure had been what ended up leaving the road map to hell traced all over his face. It had also, he'd been informed, increased his reasoning abilities, allowing him to draw quicker conclusions. The more complex technical aspects of his work had become as simple as two-plus-two, an advantage his colleagues shared.

Until now, he'd honestly believed that the reason he'd undergone so many more procedures had been because they were doing something different to him. This, though...this spoke of something going wrong, something not working the way it should have. And that would mean that the other procedures hadn't worked properly, either. Something was fucking up along the way, Leonard considered, an icy chill tripping up his spine. Something big, if it had prompted one of the people running this project to speak to him directly.

"Doctor McCoy. You will return to your quarters until further notice. A meal will be brought to you at midday. Do not leave your quarters at any time. Do you understand?"

"Yeah...yes." Clearing his throat, Leonard sat up as soon as the restraints released him. "Yes, sir, I understand," he elaborated obediently.

He needed to be obedient right now, because if something was going wrong...if it was him, there was every chance they'd consider him unfit for further procedures. And if he was unfit, if he was gumming up their works, then he was probably more trouble than he was worth. A walking corpse, essentially. And without him, what reason would they have to let Joanna live?

He clung to a sliver of hope that told him that they would want to study him, find out what was going wrong. He wasn't expendable just yet, he reminded himself as he yanked on his scrubs and padded barefoot back down the corridor. They would keep him alive so long as he could give them information. He wasn't dead yet.

Joanna wasn't dead yet.

He tried not to run through the bunker, tried not to fidget in the elevator, but by the time he reached his quarters he was a shivering, hyperventilating mess. Stumbling to his bed, he crawled onto the tiny mattress and curled up in the middle, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes as they misted with tears of helplessness.

"'M not dead yet," he whispered. "'M not dead yet. 'M not dead yet. Not dead yet. Not dead yet."

As he drifted off on the cold little mattress, shaking too hard to grasp the sheet and pull it over himself, Leonard admitted to himself that he'd been a dead man walking the moment Stratos had noticed him.

He dreamt of balloons and whipped cream smiles and bloody teeth gnashing at him angrily, and a baby crying somewhere, just around every corner, but never there when he looked.

Slowly, the cries became louder, shriller, until it was a persistent wail, and lightning flashed behind his eyelids as he was dragged over the edge of a cliff, and...

The second he hit the floor, Leonard jerked awake, one hand already fisted in the shirt of the one who'd dragged him from his bed. Gasping, he stared wildly up at his attacker. Blue eyes, bright like the summer sky over Georgia, stared back, hard and uncompromising. The lights of the Code Red alert system seared across Leonard's enhanced vision, sparkling in the stranger's eyes as the klaxons screamed.

"Let's go, Subject," the man behind the eyes spat, a contemptuous sneer emphasizing the word 'Subject' until it was a vicious slur. "Time to face the music."

Leonard barely had time to mumble, "Don't know the words," before a slim, dark hand reached around the blue-eyed man and jabbed a hypo into his neck, and then the universe went black.


	2. In The Balance

Part Two: In The Balance

Consciousness returned slowly, carrying vague impressions of the clank of machinery, the smell of antiseptic and blood, the murmur of people going about their business, and a steady whud-whud that served as an undercurrent for all of it.

Leonard sighed, shivering underneath his sheet...but no. It wasn't his sheet. It was thicker, heavier, and was doing a decent job of warding off the worst of the chill. Moreover, he was definitely not wearing the worn, itchy scrubs he'd been dressed in before - someone had stripped him.

And, apparently, tied him to a biobed.

Leonard tried very hard not to panic as he tested the restraints. They weren't the cold metal of the procedure room at the end of the corridor, made instead of some sort of hard-wearing fabric, but they held fast. They didn't hurt him, which did a bit to soothe his fear, though God knew superficial injuries never bothered him for long anymore. He gave another experimental tug.

"They're not gonna give," a low voice spoke up from somewhere to Leonard's right. "I'm good at knots."

"Whatever kinky fuckery you get up to on your own time ain't my business," Leonard snorted, opening his eyes slowly. The ceiling was metal, and there was a vitals monitor over his head, quiet tones indicating when his pulse or respirations hitched, as they did now.

"So," he continued as he let his eyes drift towards the voice, taking in more biobeds, the medical equipment on the tray beside him, and coming to rest on the tense form of the blond man seated a few feet away, "is this the part where you open me up to find out where you went wrong? Because, I gotta tell you, poking and prodding at me like a god damned lab rat was probably your first mistake."

The figure in the seat blinked, and Leonard belatedly recognize the vibrant blue eyes that were peering at him. The rough voice and the sharp glare cutting through the klaxons in his quarters pinged in his mind, and he snorted.

"Kinda young for a disciple of Mengele, aren't you?"

It really was a young face, he realized, in spite of the weariness and the hard suspicion and the scar that carved a crescent from just under his right eye to the curve of his chin. It was like the track of a tear, which Leonard supposed was a bit poetic, although he wasn't all too certain that this asshole, whoever he was, appreciated things like poetry.

There were other scars. Leonard could see them, but to someone with normal eyesight, they'd barely be visible - a row dotting over one eyebrow, three parallel cuts to the left of his Adam's apple, a few criss-crossing over his cheeks. They had been better cared for than the first scar, tended to quickly and looked after while healing. He wondered where the large one had come from, why it hadn't healed as well, why it hadn't been looked after.

Blue Eyes broke him from his thoughts, head tilting to the side slightly. "Who the fuck is Mengele?"

"Doctor. Of sorts. He performed experiments on the concentration camp inmates for the Nazis. Especially kids. Twins," he added as an afterthought. "He had this thing about twins."

Leonard tried not to think of the cages back in the bunker, of the soul after soul under his knife, or the swirl of blood and bile as it circled the drains. He tried very hard, mostly because he was strapped on his back, so if he vomited, he couldn't be sure he wouldn't end up drowning in it. Just because he was about to die didn't mean he had to die in such a pathetic way.

"Never mind," he mumbled, letting his eyes slide shut again. "Just get on with it."

"And what," Blue Eyes began, the softness of his voice nearly masking the edge of danger in it, "do you think we're planning to do with you?"

"Oh, the usual. Inject stuff. Remove stuff. Slice out bits of my brain while I'm still conscious to try and figure out why your brilliant procedures have been failing. Here's a hint," he added, ignoring the way his terrified heart rate made the monitor chime. "People are a bit more complicated then lab rats, and a hell of a lot more stubborn, and you can take you rewiring project and shove it up your sadistic fascist ass."

There was ringing silence, and someone to Leonard's left coughed softly. He didn't look - he pinned Blue Eyes with a furious glower that probably looked more like the wild-eyes panic of a rabbit caught in a hawk's talons, and strained against his bonds uselessly.

"What's your name?"

The question threw him off, and Leonard blinked, bewildered. Blue Eyes wasn't giving anything away on his face, but his fingers were digging into his biceps, which, Leonard noticed for the first time, were bared. The man wore the black uniform trousers of a Stratos overseer, the green-and-silver Earth entwined with the infinity symbol clearly visible on one of the cargo pockets, but instead of the stiff, high-collared jacket, he was wearing a sleeveless gray tunic that laced up the front. His white-knuckled grip was covering most of some sort of tattoo, and Leonard wondered idly if it was a Stratos thing or a personal decision. His gaze didn't miss the weapon the man wore at his hip, either, and he suppressed a shiver.

"What is your name?" Blue Eyes repeated, firmer this time, rising from his seat in a single, graceful motion.

A test? Leonard narrowed his eyes. "Subject zero-two-zer-"

"No." Blue Eyes was suddenly at the bedside, hand tangling in Leonard's hair and clenching, jerking roughly and forcing Leonard to look him in the eye. "What. Is. Your. Name?"

"...McCoy. Leonard McCoy, MD," he elaborated, shaking roughly as a tangle of emotions slammed into him. Relief, confusion, anger, loss, defiance, fear. Echoes of the shock of earlier, when the deep voice had used his name. He tried to remember the last time anyone had asked his name, asked anything about his life before. Had it been after that first procedure? Before?

Leonard drew in a breath, but it caught on the edge of the sob welling in his throat. "My name..." He huffed an irritated sigh. "My name is Leonard McCoy, MD. Born 20 January, 2227 in Roswell, Georgia. Graduate of the University of Mississippi and the Ole Miss School of Medicine. Son of David and-"

"Enough." The hand left his hair, and Blue Eyes backed away slowly, face twisted into a bewildered frown. "That's...that's enough. I-" Glancing across the room, presumably at whoever had coughed, Blue Eyes bit his lip. "You really didn't volunteer, did you? For the augmentations."

Leonard's eyebrows shot up, and he couldn't tamp down the bitter, sobbing laughter that bubbled up. "Vol-volunteer...oh. Oh, that's...that's just..."

"I'll take that as a no," Blue Eyes mused, the corner of his mouth twitching. "So, I'm guessing you probably hate Stratos about as much as we do."

Leonard's insides froze. "We? We who? Who are you? What have you done?" These people weren't with Stratos? This man wasn't an overseer? They weren't at the bunker? That meant that he'd been abducted, which was bad on so many levels.

Shrugging, Blue Eye looked again towards the other side of the room. Leonard followed his gaze, taking in the two shapes standing against the far wall.

There was a young female, as scarred as Blue Eyes, with dark skin, keen eyes, and a gun on her hip. Her hair cut close to her head utilitarianly, and she carried herself gracefully and confidently. Like Blue Eyes, she wore the Stratos uniform trousers and a plain gray top. She was watching him solemnly, though just behind the fire burning in her eyes there lurked the same confusion Blue Eyes had expressed.

Beside her stood a male, also young, also scarred, with an impassive expression and inky-silk hair that brushed his chin. He stood rigidly, hands clasped behind his back, and his eyes gleamed with an analytical intelligence. His ears, Leonard noticed, bore the odd sort of ridging along the tops that several assholes in the medical community called the Doily Effect, because it resembled the uniformly bumpy edges of a lace doily. A Vulcan, then, and one who'd had his ears clumsily docked. He wore no slave collar, though, which struck Leonard as odd - he'd only ever seen captive Vulcans with docked ears.

Seeming to consider him, both of the figures tilted their heads in eerie synchronization, and Leonard looked back at Blue Eyes.

"My name is Kirk," he said finally, crossing his arms over his chest and rocking back on his heels. "Captain James T. Kirk. Those are Quartermaster Nyota Uhura," he continued, gesturing at the woman, "and First Mate Spock. You're in the sickbay of the pirate ship Enterprise."

"Oh." This, Leonard thought, must be what the forming of a black hole felt like. A cold vacuum opened up inside him, and everything - all the fight, all the hope, all of him - was suddenly sucked away. Head lolling back to stare at the ceiling again, Leonard felt the tired and angry tears he'd been holding back spill over. "Oh, no. Oh, God, no."

"Woah, hey, relax," Kirk barked, looking alarmed even at the edge of Leonard's sight. "We're not gonna keelhaul you, so long as you-"

"No," Leonard breathed. "You have no idea what you've done by bringing me here. No idea."

But Leonard knew. He knew exactly what the people running Stratos would think. He knew that they knew that he was as good as dead to them. Which meant Joanna was as good as dead, as well.

She was probably already dead, he realized with an agonized moan, squeezing his eyes shut against the wrenching pain in his chest. How long had he been out? Hours? Days?

"Enlighten me, then, since you seem to know so much." Leaning against the bed, Kirk grinned at him, the expression made all the more ghastly by Leonard's grief. "What's Stratos up to?"

"You...you stupid..." Leonard sucked in a breath, but nothing seemed to be getting to his lungs. Nothing was working. More tears escaped, rolling down into his ears, and he retched and heaved, trying to inhale, trying to breathe past the sudden nothingness. His fingers scrabbled at the sheet beneath him, tugging and tearing until his nails bent and broke, wheezing all the while.

"Joanna," he gasped. "My baby. My baby girl. They...they had... To make me...to make me behave...Joanna."

Kirk went very still. "Stratos had your daughter?"

"Dead. I'm gone," Leonard keened. "I'm gone and she's dead, she must be dead."

Even with his enhanced vision, everything was blurred and swirling, everything hurt, and yet there was nothing. Nothing inside but a yawning vortex and a primal urge to scream that he just didn't have enough air to fulfill.

"Nyota," Kirk snapped, wide eyes watching Leonard's every move. Before the doctor could jerk away, she had jabbed another hypo into his neck, and once more, everything faded away.

:::

Consciousness was much more unwelcome this time, because it brought with it an ache in his throat and his fingertips, and memory. Memory of the realization, memory of the despair that had taken hold. What was there to wake up for now?

Voices faded in as the fuzzy edges of chemical sedation receded.

"...fault, Jim. You couldn't have known."

"I should have known. Damn it, Spock, I've never gotten someone killed before. Not an innocent, anyway. This is so fucked up."

"Shut up, Jim."

"Nyota-"

"No, just shut the fuck up. You didn't know they had his kid. Hell, you didn't even know he was there against his will; every Subject we've come across before has been a volunteer."

"I should have guessed. I mean, did you see that room they had him in? It wasn't like the cages, but Jesus..."

"I saw, and I still didn't guess. Look, I'm as sorry about the kid as you are, Jim, but we've still got a mission, okay? We need to know what he knows."

"Right. I'm sure he'll just jump at the chance to help the guy who got his only daughter murdered. He seemed so eager to help before."

"Fuck you," Leonard slurred, blinking at the three figured huddled together next to the bed. "And your fucking mission."

"See?" Kirk leaned against the railing of the bed on his elbows, face hovering over Leonard's. His eyes were concerned, and wary, and, Leonard thought, fairly regretful. As they should be, he reminded himself as grief stabbed at his heart.

"We gave you a bit of a relaxant," Nyota explained in a frustratingly soothing voice as his eyes tried to close against his will. "You were hyperventilating. You were going to hurt yourself if you kept it up."

Snorting, Leonard sneered at her. "Right. I'm sure you give all the fucks about my well-being. After all, you're just as sorry as the captain is about my kid." An odd sort of pain flitted across her expression, but it was soon buried beneath the surety she wore like a party mask. His breath hitched again, and he swallowed a few times until he was sure he could speak. "You can take whatever mission you have and fuck yourselves with it," he snapped. "I don't care."

"Listen, McCoy-"

"No. No, you listen, Captain," Leonard hissed. "Joanna was it, okay? She was everything. She was all I had. She kept me going through every fucking thing they did to me, everything they made me do. She was the one thing...the only thing that kept me from killing myself. Every fucking day before I went to sleep, I thought about it, but she needed me to live so that she could live. She was all I had. All I cared about. She was my mission. And now she's gone, and there is nothing left. So do what you want, okay? Toss me out an airlock, keelhaul me, hang me from the highest support beam, whatever. I don't care. I just don't care anymore."

Kirk stared down at him blankly, seeming to consider his words. Then, in a gentler tone than Leonard would have imagined the flippant, battle-scarred pirate capable of, he said, "What if I told you I knew the name of the person responsible for all of it? For what happened to you, and what happened to your daughter. All of it. And what if I told you that our mission is to find him and kill him, along with every sorry piece of shit aligned with him? And what if I told you that if you helped me locate him, I would make it my next mission to pinpoint exactly which of those bastards took your daughter's life, and that I would let you take the shot?"

Nyota and Spock exchanged glances, conversing silently. Whatever they were discussing, they seemed to come out in support of Kirk, because they didn't contradict him. Leonard sighed, tired and worn and done, but he answered anyway, because two years in hell doing abhorrent things to keep Joanna alive didn't mean he'd stopped clinging to his humanity.

"Can't. Won't. I'm a doctor, not a murderer."

Kirk threw his head back an laughed, and it felt mocking, even though Leonard knew it wasn't. "Do no harm, huh?" Edging closer, Jim grinned again. It wasn't friendly or mocking this time, instead a quick flash of teeth that would have seemed more fitting on a man-eating shark. "I think I like you, McCoy. So I'll give you a freebie. No strings. Promise."

Leonard didn't answer, letting the echoes of the drugs tug his eyes closed again as Kirk pressed his mouth up next to Leonard's ear.

"His name is Khan."


	3. Perpetual Motion

Part Three: Perpetual Motion

The quarters that Leonard had been given on the Enterprise were at least twice the size of his room at Stratos, which wasn't saying much, but it also included a softer mattress, a real blanket, and a bathroom he didn't have to sidle into sideways, so he definitely counted it as an improvement. There was also an empty set of shelves, ostensibly for knick-knacks or paper books, and a closet to one side of the door. It was comfortable in a way he'd nearly forgotten rooms could be, and that annoyed him for reasons he didn't quite understand.

The captain had provided him with clothes, such as he could, borrowed from various crew members. Leonard hadn't much cared what he wore, but when he'd seen the sturdy boots in the pile, he'd managed a slight smile. Kirk had watched as he'd pulled them on and stared down at them like they were a miracle cure, and the captain's eyes had filled with an odd sort of anger. He'd produced the soft, threadbare moccasin slippers Leonard had worn for the past two years and, uncaring of the fire alarm, had proceeded to set fire to them in the sink in Leonard's bathroom.

"Ugly-ass things," the captain had snorted, making a show of rubbing his hands together and warming them as a noxious sort of smoke rose. It had occurred to Leonard then that Kirk was actually trying to cheer him up. He'd almost wanted to laugh, even more than he'd wanted to punch the younger man. He'd wondered if Kirk had ever lost anyone.

Don't be ridiculous, his brain had supplied as his quicksilver eyes had met Kirk's radioactive blue in the mirror, smoke drifting between them. He's a pirate, captaining a stolen Starfleet ship ("Commandeered," Kirk had corrected at one point, beaming proudly as he patted the hull), declaring a one-man war against the Stratos Initiative, one of the most powerful private organizations on Earth. Of course he's lost people.

Leonard hadn't asked, though, just as Kirk had never asked about Joanna. He hadn't asked for anything, actually, since Leonard had woken again to find his restraints gone and his pants being thrust in his face by an Orion girl who'd introduced herself as Gaila. The captain had stood behind her, gaze distant and unsure, informing Leonard that Gaila had cleared him to leave sickbay.

"Is she your doctor?" Leonard had asked, curious despite himself.

Kirk had only shrugged. "Don't really have one. Most of the crew pulls sickbay duty when we need someone."

"You had one at some point, at least until recently," Leonard had pointed out. Off of Kirk's curious expression, he'd elaborated. "Your scars are mostly faint, undetectable by people with average eyesight, except for the one along your cheek." Leonard had wondered at the slight spasm in expression Kirk had given at that, but the captain hadn't responded, and Leonard hadn't pressed.

He hadn't left his quarters for several days once he'd been given them, but what he'd seen of the ship had been surprisingly clean and in good repair. Kirk, it seemed, was extremely proud of his vessel, and took great pains to keep her in ship-shape - Kirk's word of choice, not Leonard's. Leonard was still pretty sure Kirk was compensating for something, but as the blond man had opted not to torture whatever information Leonard might have had out of him, and had, instead, treated him with incredibly off-putting kindness, Leonard had returned the favor by not making unflattering insinuations about the captain's manhood.

For the next five days, the crew had left him alone, except for twice a day when a young, ginger-haired man with a thick brogue had brought him a tray of food. It was mostly replicated food, but it was good food - meat and cheese and vegetables and all sorts of things he hadn't thought he'd ever get to taste again. There were always slices of peach, though, tart, sweet, and juicy, and certainly not replicated. He'd wondered a bit about that until, on the third day, he'd broken his self-imposed vow of silence and asked the Scotsman.

"Oh, that's the captain, Dr. McCoy. He insisted on the peaches, seeing as you're from Georgia. I s'pose he thought you'd enjoy them. He likes to have fresh fruit on board - we get these from a trading colony at the edge of our solar system."

"You can tell your captain," Leonard had drawled, edging the peaches onto the lid of the tray and handing them back to the man, "that I don't take bribes."

The man had raised an eyebrow, but hadn't replied, and the next morning he brought a meal that was three servings of peaches and nothing else.

"Captain's orders, doctor," the man - unimaginatively called Scotty, he'd learned - had said off Leonard's withering glare. Unbothered by the murderous gleam in the doctor's eyes, Scotty had grinned and swept from the room with a jaunty, "Bon appetit!"

Leonard had stared at the tray for a few minutes, breathing heavily, before he'd stood, carrying it out the door and stalking through the corridors until he'd located a lift.

Peaches. It had to be fucking peaches. That stupid, smarmy, smart-ass had been just unlucky enough to pick the one thing that would piss Leonard off the most. Peaches were Georgia, were home. They were childhood summers and porch swings and no worries about the future. Peaches were before. What kind of moron did the man have to be to think that being reminded of all he'd lost would somehow comfort Leonard?

Peaches. New(ish) clothes. His own room. Jokes and laughter and acting like Leonard's world hadn't ended. Like it wasn't Kirk's fault.

The bridge had been mostly empty when he'd burst in, certain he'd looked at least the littlest bit crazed and homicidal. Certainly, the three people there who hadn't been Captain Crackpot had stared at him as though they'd believed he might snap and bludgeon them all to death with his tray. Honestly, he couldn't have been sure that, had one of them said the wrong thing, he mightn't have tried, doctor or not.

Two of the occupants of the bridge had been Kirk's companions from the sickbay, when Leonard had first woken up. Nyota, the hard-edged beauty who had sedated him more than once with a bit more enthusiasm than was strictly necessary, had been seated at what Leonard knew to be the helm, ignoring her duties in favor of watching him with predatory eyes. The other, Spock, had been stood at the captain's shoulder, PADD in hand, and had given Leonard rather a peevish look when his entrance had interrupted whatever pressing business they'd been discussing.

To one side had sat another man, rougish and smirking, with dark hair and eyes that had seemed to mock Leonard's very existence. He'd leaned back in his chair, swiveling around to face Leonard directly, hands folded behind his head, and Leonard had gotten the feeling that he was merely entertainment for the man. His name was Mitchell, Leonard would find out later, and Leonard didn't think he'd ever get past his first, uncomfortable impression that the man had been laughing at him.

"Doc," Kirk's voice had rung out, jerking Leonard from his musings and reminding him of his current mission. It had taken only a moment to storm to the captain's chair, and barely a breath for his rage to bubble over.

Kirk had been smiling at him. Smiling. At Leonard. Smiling as though Leonard had traipsed in on a social call, as though they were friends.

The anger had sizzled hot and painful under his skin, rising until he was tipping the tray and dumping the peaches onto Kirk's lap without a second thought.

"Keep your god damned peaches, you bastard! I don't want shit from you!"

Throwing the tray down, he'd met Kirk's unimpressed gaze for a moment before turning and storming back to his quarters.

He'd told himself he didn't regret it when, for the next twenty-four hours, he'd received no meals. Instead, he'd shucked his borrowed clothes, tugged on his grubby scrubs, and curled up on the floor between the foot of the bed and the wall. He'd slept through most of the hunger pangs, waking once or twice with a sob and the faint memory of a child's laughter. God, what he wouldn't have given for a fifth of bourbon.

It was the polite, yet insistent, chime of his door that had roused him finally, but he'd made no move to answer. The noise had continued for a few minutes before the door slid open, and Kirk's boots had moved into his line of sight.

"The bed's more comfortable."

"I told you," Leonard has rasped, tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth.

"Yeah, yeah," Kirk had interrupted, crouching down in front of Leonard's shaking form. "You don't want shit from me. How about singing a tune I haven't heard?"

"I hate you from the bottom of my heart," Leonard had warbled, off-key and nearly in a whisper, and Kirk had laughed the way he had in the sickbay. Leonard had been certain, then, that he'd meant every word he'd sung.

But Kirk had been undaunted, and had reached out and dragged Leonard off the floor by the front of his scrubs and tossed him onto the bed. "You're a stubborn bastard, you know that?"

"Too pathetic to live, too stubborn to die."

"Fuck that." Tossing the blanket haphazardly over Leonard's body, Kirk had sat at the edge of the bed and smacked him on the head with his pillow. "Look, grieve, okay? Nobody can tell you that you haven't earned the right to mourn what you've lost. And you've lost a hell of a lot. So, you know, if you've gotta be sad, or angry, or whatever, just...be that.

"And if you want to be angry at me, fine. I deserve that. I was reckless, and I was stupid, and I got the most important person in your life killed. I more than deserve all the loathing you can muster up in that withered old heart of yours. I don't mind. I'll take whatever you want to dish out. But, McCoy?" Kirk pinned him with a glare. "Don't waste food. Especially not fresh food. That's a dick thing to do, even on Earth. In space? Yeah. Don't do it."

Leonard had blinked sleepily as Kirk had bent down to pick a tray up off the floor.

"You look like you could use some more sleep, so I'll leave this here for you when you wake up."

It had been there, as promised, but there were no peaches, and Leonard still couldn't decide if he'd been disappointed or relieved.

Today was the seventh day, and Kirk had shown up at his door again, tray in one hand, bottle of scotch in the other.

"From Scotty," the pirate had explained, setting both down on the small bedside table as Leonard had sat up with a snort.

"Scotty the Scotsman sent scotch? How cliche of him."

Kirk had laughed, and Leonard had wished it wasn't such a likeable laugh. It was friendly and open in a way the captain didn't normally seem to be, and it annoyed Leonard that someone so scarred inside and out could laugh like that. It seemed wrong.

And now they were about halfway through the bottle, pausing in passing it back and forth to snag a slice of peach from the tray, and Leonard had been watching Kirk lick the sticky juice from his fingertips when suddenly, he sat up.

"Her mother's name was Jocelyn," Leonard said quietly, sitting on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched against Kirk's curious gaze.

"Hmm."

It was a non-committal noise, but not dismissive, and Leonard found himself continuing.

"I met her at a party, first year in med school. She was there with a third-year student, some guy who went on to work in oncology. Lord, was she ever beautiful. Big ol' eyes, all soft curls and pretty smiles. I fell in love with her before I ever heard her speak. She was just all kinds of perfect.

"Passionate, too," he sighed, accepting the bottle and taking a swig before passing it back. "Debate you about anything at the drop of a hat, had a million and two causes she was prepared to die for." He trailed off, tracing his lower lip absently. "And one of 'em caught up with her."

Kirk said nothing, staring at the wall with a contemplative look in his eyes, fingers tracing up the neck of the bottle of scotch absently.

"Joanna was three. She was the light of our lives, you know? Some people think having a kid puts strain on a marriage, but...I don't know. Joce was such a good mother, I couldn't help but love her more for it. And Joanna, oh, from the moment she looked at me when I held her the first time, I knew she owned me, would own me until the end of my days.

"When Joanna was two, Joce started talking about change. Change in society, change in the government. And not the little kind of change, like petitioning for new street signs. She was talking about big change. Revolutionary change. There'd been a lot of talk about the Council, mostly by students, you know? Like that book, the one about the French kids and the furniture wall."

"Les Miserables," Kirk supplied absently.

"Yeah. That one. The one where everyone died. And then there was the MIT incident, you remember? Bunch of kids in social sciences apparently commited mass suicide at a party, except it just didn't feel right. Joce was sure the Council had been behind it. She was livid, started getting angrier and talking louder about it. I didn't want her to get involved. I had...I had seen, down at the hospital...I had seen people come in. I had seen their injuries - broken feet, electrical burns, welts and lacerations. And the injuries inside, as well, injuries to the mind that would never heal.

"Sometimes...sometimes one of Joce's friends would come in, broken in ways you can't imagine, begging for death. And all I could see whenever she started on her political rants was her being put on my table, broken and begging, and I...I couldn't."

Kirk's gaze had slid to Leonard at some point, still contemplative, and Leonard snagged the bottle just to have something to do with his hands.

"I pleaded with her not to keep going. I begged her to think of Joanna, to think of her safety. I yelled and screamed and cried, and then she left. Went off with some serious-as-tits revolutionary friends of hers, without so much as a goodbye to her daughter. And six months later, just a couple of days after Jo turned three, I watched her and her rebel friends get put down by a firing squad on national television." He took a long pull from the bottle, leaning over to hand it to Kirk. "I never told Jo what happened to her. Just that Mommy had to leave to do important things. She...she never knew."

"I'm sorry," Kirk whispered, staring down the neck of the bottle at the liquid sloshing within. "I'm sorry."

"Not your fault," Leonard admitted, unable to look back at the captain. "Not your fault what happened to Joce, and..." He swallowed painfully. "And it's not your fault what happened to Jo. It's my fault. Jo's blood is on my hands."

"No." Kirk looked at him then, eyes blazing, face set grimly. "No. It's on Khan's hands, McCoy. He murdered your daughter, and we'll make him pay for it."

He looked a bit like Jocelyn had, just then, Leonard mused. All righteous fury and determination, and absolutely no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. Because apparently, to people like them, there were more important things than personal safetly and the preservation of life. Things like liberty and happiness. They were idealists, these rebellious sorts, so sure that things would be better afterwards. After what, Leonard didn't know, but he had a feeling that a lot of people were going to die in the interim. It was a lot of risk for a long shot, but folks like Jocelyn and Kirk didn't seem to understand that. They really believed it would be worth it in the end.

But then, Leonard had been awfully concerned with his own safety, and with Joanna's, and look where that had gotten them. Two years of torment for him, two years of...God only knew what for her. And now he'd somehow become a pawn on this revolutionary chess board, and Joanna...Joanna was...

It really didn't matter now, Leonard realized, staring down at his hands. It didn't matter what he did, or where he was, or whether or not he cooperated. He had nothing left to lose, after all.

"Yeah," he said softly, mouth stretching in a parody of a smile. He glanced up to meet Kirk's angry eyes. "Yeah, I think we will."

Kirk's answering grin had been all kinds of feral, the sort one found on wild things with steak-knife teeth and no fear. And maybe, a week ago, it would have frightened Leonard. No, it definitely would have frightened him - the cold, hard edge to it that spoke of death. But now...

Now death was all Leonard had left, wasn't it?


End file.
